ReContext: Recursive Evidence Replay as LLM Harness for Long-Context Reasoning

Long-context reasoning requires models to locate, revise, and synthesize evidence distributed across lengthy inputs. Existing long-context RL methods usually reward final answers or static evidence extraction, offering little feedback on how intermediate actions change the model's evidence state. We propose Maven, a reinforcement learning framework with an editable evidence memory. Maven defines an answer-conditioned evidence-state value and rewards action-level state transitions: add actions are credited by marginal gain and hindsight contribution, link actions by evidence synergy, and drop actions by improved answer support after removing misleading evidence. These rewards are assigned to the corresponding action spans in GRPO. Across Llama and Qwen models on LongBench v2, LongReason, and RULER, Maven outperforms outcome-only RL and evidence-identification baselines, producing more sufficient evidence sets and lower distractor retention. Our results show that long-context RL benefits from optimizing stateful evidence navigation rather than one-shot evidence extraction.

Long-context reasoning requires accurately identifying relevant information in extensive, noisy input contexts. In this work, we propose PERK (Parameter Efficient Reasoning over Knowledge), a scalable approach for learning to encode long contexts using gradient updates at test time. Specifically, PERK employs two nested optimization loops in a meta-training phase. The inner loop rapidly encodes contexts into a low-rank adapter (LoRA) that serves as a parameter-efficient memory module for the base model. Concurrently, the outer loop learns to use the updated adapter to accurately recall and reason over relevant information from the encoded long context. Our evaluations on several long-context reasoning tasks show that PERK significantly outperforms the standard long-context finetuning, achieving average absolute performance gains of up to 20% for Qwen-2.5 (0.5B & 7B) on synthetic and real-world long-context reasoning. PERK also maintains its advantages across model scales and families. Compared to specialized long-context LLMs, PERK matches or surpasses their performance. Finally, our analyses show PERK is more robust to reasoning complexity, length extrapolation, and the positions of relevant information in contexts. https://perk-long-context.web.app

Long-context reasoning remains a critical bottleneck for large language models, as recent recurrent-memory approaches face two inherent challenges: sequential chunk-wise updates can overwrite early critical evidence with later irrelevant content, and serial inter-chunk dependencies limit parallelism and cause latency to increase with context length. To address these issues, we propose PI-Mem (Parallel-Iterative Memory), a mechanism that processes all chunks in parallel and iteratively refines a shared memory over a bounded number of turns. In each turn, PI-Mem reads all chunks in parallel conditioned on the current memory, selects new or complementary evidence from each chunk, and merges the selected evidence into a compact shared memory for the next turn. To discourage redundant turns, we optimize the workflow through reinforcement learning with an auxiliary turn-efficiency reward, enabling the model to adaptively exit once sufficient evidence has been accumulated. We evaluate PI-Mem with Qwen3.5-35B-A3B and Qwen2.5-7B on the HotpotQA benchmark across context lengths up to 3.6 million tokens and find that it outperforms the recurrent-memory baseline by +6.25 and +7.81 absolute points while achieving 6.1$\times$ and 2.1$\times$ inference speedups, respectively. These results demonstrate that PI-Mem breaks the accuracy--efficiency trade-off in long-context reasoning and provides a scalable approach to complex multi-hop question answering over extremely long documents.